Can rituals improve our relationship with technology?

Do social media restrictions help or hinder our lives? Alan Levinovitz uses a new approach inspired by Confucius and Daoism to explain how rituals can improve our relationship with technology.

The Hedgehog Review offers critical reflections on cultural identity, change, and diversity; seeking to understand how we shape culture, and how culture shapes us.  

The Hedgehog Review

 The dao of using your smartphone

What does marriage look like in the modern age? Mary Harrington explores its future in society as we shift from traditional values and live in a more complex world.

Is there hope for marriage?

Inside the sexual revolution. 

Sex positivity allegedly promotes an open-minded, gender-neutral approach to sex and relationships. However, is this really the case? Phoebe Maltz Bovy discusses how the movement has helped and harmed women over generations.

Sex positivity

What’s the real reason behind the Ukrainian war?

Depending on who you ask, Putin is seen as either a tyrant or a hero. However, for John M. Owen, one thing is clear. Russia is not fighting for morality but power, and Ukraine is not fighting for individualism but survival.

Russia's war, and ours

Who is the real nihilist in this struggle?

In the battle between Russia and Ukraine, two dominant characters have emerged. On one side, Martha Bayles contemplates, Putin's invasion is partly inspired by the claim that Moscow - the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church - was the sole remaining bastion of Christ in a world of decay and apostasy. On the other, she reflects on how Zelensky's efforts echo 'Nietzsche's discussion of "monumental history" when an individual with a "powerful spirit" partakes in this variety of history when he or she seizes upon a great deed from the past and uses it as inspiration for bold, creative action in the present.'

Vladimir and Volodymyr: a pivotal moment in history

Trading false simplicity for complicated truth.

When someone is certain, it is tough to learn. “In the absence of bewilderment,” argues Alan Levinovitz, “we become like tyrants: inflexible, certain, over-confident. Rigid oppositional binaries reign supreme. Religion vs Science, Left vs Right, Us vs Them. Change is nearly impossible.”

In praise of bewilderment

Attention is finite, the record of how we spend it is public.

What is “whataboutism”? Critic B.D. McClay reflects on the social tech phenomenon. "The online term for this move is whataboutism, though more formally it is usually a variant of the tu quoque gambit, in which someone who is outraged by one thing but not visibly outraged by another is called a hypocrite, a bad faith interlocutor, even if no real mismatch between values and actions is present. "

Whataboutism

Everyone is on a quest for spiritual originality. 

No matter your beliefs, a dominant theme unifying all forms of spirituality is an overwhelming desire for it to be authentic - a demand which can lead to feelings of anxiety because it promises so much and yet rarely seems to deliver. From Orthodox Judaism to the CrossFit cult, Emily G. Wenneborg looks into our spiritual traditions and the institutions that sustain them to dissect what it means to be authentic.

Authenticity's imperative

Why the art of medicine is the art of thinking.

The concept of 'medical humanities' might not be exceptionally well known except for those in the profession, but it's a side of medicine quickly gaining traction. Its original purpose is "to expand a doctor's way of thinking in a general sense, by widening the doctor's horizon." However, many remain sceptical of how much their practise can be improved by them. Physician Ronald W. Dworkin reflects on the debate and, using his personal experiences, explains why both sides could gain a lot from hearing each other's arguments.

Medical humanities and the specialist

All great rulers have one thing in common: they have to fall.  

Tsarist Russia was once one of the world's most influential nations, giving rise to some of the greatest music, dance and literature in human history. However, today, as Putin's military aggression harks back to the Soviet age, the delicate global political balance is in jeopardy once again. Walter C. Clemens, Jr examines Russia's transformation from the culture that spawned War and Peace, and Swan Lake, to a country where thousands of intellects and artists are fleeing from rampant oppression, censorship and shame.

How to destroy a civilization

Why do good fortune and prosperity leave so many of us unhappy?

Matt Dinan, an assistant professor in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, here reviews the book "Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment" by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey. For Dinan, reading the book was a conglomerated experience delving into the works of Montaignean, complex notions of the self and the meaning of life within a North American landscape.

American restlessness

Out of all the possible ways to think and learn, is one way better than the rest?

For anyone involved in 21st-century philosophy, humanistic reasoning, which can trace its origins back to Immanuel Kant in 19th-century Germany, is considered the status quo. However, it wasn't always this way. In this review of "A defense of judgement" by Michael Clune, Matthew Mutters uses the works of several renowned thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault to discuss how philosophical thinking has evolved over the generations.

Judge knot

The troubles that ensued can't be blamed on just one bad apple. 

Crisis Text Line, founded in 2013 to provide free messaging services and intervention tools, was supposed to be the answer to the rapidly worsening mental health crisis. However, despite a promising start and assurances that the platform was anonymous, a January 2022 report by Politico tarnished the company's reputation overnight. Emma Bedor Hiland examines the company's failure of social responsibility, exploitation of well-intentioned volunteers and how corporate greed perpetuated pre-existing disparities between those who do and do not have access to mental healthcare. 

How smart tech tried to solve the mental health crisis and only made it worse

Taking the midlife crisis seriously.

Midlife crises are, in this sense, the last chance to nurture the essential parts of ourselves that contemporary life cannot accommodate. In this analysis of Mark Jackson's study of the midlife crisis, Trevor Quirk asks us to consider the time as a legitimate category of suffering.

Climacteric!

Is modern feminism a good use of anybody's time? 

Multiple versions of feminism have occupied American media for decades: girl power, girlboss-ism and even #MeToo. Although Lily Meyer has encountered misogyny, the idea of being told how to be free irritates her. In this review of Amia Srinivasan's debut essay collection, "The Right to Sex", Meyer discusses the ways mainstream feminism wields its power, including the skewed and racialised pyramid of gender advance and the idea of compulsory heterosexuality.

Sex and power

Meditations on the American Dream.

History shows that African Americans were born into a world that provided them with disappointment and injustice. Therefore, the American Dream has never been a concept they could expect to achieve that none could hope to accomplish.

Associate professor of sociology Angel Adams Parham reflects on how “such injustice can understandably lead to prolonged bitterness and anger, black Americans have more profitably translated their hurt and anger into powerful art and constructive protest.”

A tale of two stories

Group identity is an inescapable fact of who we are.

Our earliest attachments determine and shape the quality of those later in life. So it is no surprise to Alan Shapiro that growing up in the 1950s as both Jewish and American led to him having a deep and inescapable need to belong. His family were Jews at home and in the synagogue, but everywhere else, they were good Americans embracing the invisibility of the socially acceptable.

From his earliest childhood to the deep depression of his teenage years, where he became interested in Allen Ginsberg and the rest of the Beat generation, the award-winning poet describes how he discovered his one and only passion, which transformed his life.

My identity problem

The power and emotion in sticking together.

It is hard to sustain the illusion that there is anything good about winter after the hundredth day or so, but there is comfort in the support often found. In this reflection on the realities of living in a winter community, Matt Dinan explores the cold through the lens of poetry and literature and praises the power of communities that are integral to helping people stay afloat in these dangerous conditions.

On winter

On the difficult art of disagreeing civilly.

       In a world that is increasingly polarized and confrontational, we need to look more closely at cases profound disagreement did not foreclose conversation but led to extended and productive dialogue. Joseph Tulloch reflects on four key lessons found from a successful and profound exchange between a prominent Italian atheist and the Archbishop of Milan in the 1990s.

An atheist and a cardinal walk into a bar

How can we promote change?

After the outrage sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we are now accustomed to high-profile cases of police violence brought to trial, but at the turn of the 21st-century, that kind of national attention was rare. 

Through the 2020 Netflix documentary series Trial by Media, covering the horrifying murder of Amadou Diallo and his mother’s subsequent battle against systemic racism, Andrew Lynn explores how we can undo the long history of racial violence and dehumanisation of humanities, promote healing, and support the long road towards equality for all.